Gigi Langer, PhD, wrote the award-winning "50 Ways to Worry Less Now: Reject Negative Thinking to Find Peace, Clarity, and Connection" (4.8 stars). She's a sought-after speaker and retreat leader who has helped thousands of people improve their lives at home and work. She can help improve yours too! An author of six books on personal and professional growth, she's the self-proclaimed "Queen of Worry" and speaks from experience.
Directions. Read each statement and decide if it’s true or false for you.
Find the results with recommendations to lower your score at the end of the quiz. Good luck!
PS: Don’t worry if your score seems high. According to the National
Institute of Mental Health’s website, almost one in five Americans struggle
with worry and non-severe anxiety.
When I tune into what I’m thinking, I’m usually pondering something about the past or the future, rather than focusing on what is going on right now.
I often find myself wishing things were different.
I wish I could take better care of my own needs (e.g., exercise, rest, nutrition, social support).
I often clench my teeth or feel tension in my shoulders, stomach, or neck.
I wish I could worry less about my own health.
I wish I could worry less about my loved ones.
I wish I could worry less about my finances.
I wish I could worry less about world events.
I am hesitating to pursue a dream I’ve had for a while.
Anxiety and worry are things we all can struggle with at times and the core of those feelings is fear. But at some point, we have to realize we have our own loving power that’s bigger than our fear. And we need to claim that to free ourselves from the bondage of pain and lack of self-worth. The body sometimes knows how much you can handle – and if you’re open enough, it’ll give you what you need to keep growing.
On this episode of The Addicted Mind podcast, Duane talks to Gigi Langer about her award-winning book “50 Ways to Worry Less Now.” She takes us through her own recovery story, how worry and fear were a major part of it, and how she learned to overcome it and create the life that she loves and thrives in.
Find the biggest worry-buster and anxiety-buster technique!
Growing up with an alcoholic in the family, Gigi chose to be the “good girl.” At 40, she was completing her Ph.D. at Stanford and was under a lot of stress and pressure. She had a lot of crash and burn relationships and had divorced twice by the time she was in her doctoral program. She discovered marijuana, which somehow softened the blow of all her disappointments from all the tension and failed relationships. She thought her achievements and romance were going to take care of her feelings, but those didn’t work obviously.
Gigi practically lived a double life, being the good girl as the assistant professor, and also living a life of promiscuity and in the early stages of alcoholism. She then proved to herself over the next six months that she could not predict what behavior she would display even if she only had one drink.
Eventually, her third husband went to an Al-Anon meeting and Gigi went to AA. She stuck with the program and therapy. She got divorced after a year of couples therapy, this time, in a responsible way. The following year, she met her husband whom she has been married to for over 30 years now – happy and fulfilled.
Key Quotes:
[11:57] – “The true self or loving power… we have to be honest and we have to claim some kind of power bigger than our own fear.”
[13:37] – “I was afraid that if I ripped the band-aid off and started getting honest, all the feelings would come out and just completely destroy me. And that was not my experience. It still felt scary when those things came up. But I could handle them.”
[18:57] – “We think what our minds are producing is real and that our feelings are 100% real… but it is a story that our minds have made up based on our past.”
[19:33] – “The lies that we tell ourselves have nothing to do with who we are at base.”
[25:41] – “Most of the things that are advertised and glorified are things that numb us away from our true selves… if we’re numbing our feelings out with any habitual behavior, our chance of becoming happy is almost nil because we won’t be able to get honest and own what’s going on with us.”
[27:33] – “When we start to heal and get honest, and we dissolve some of those blockages, then more love flows in and out. And then these amazing things start happening.”
[28:26] – “Scary things scare us. That’s never going to stop. It’s what happens once I notice I’m scared… Call someone, reach out for help, pray, meditate, and use some of the tools. Enter the process of working with it.”
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Gigi Langer has been sober 35 years, and holds a PhD in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford University. Formerly crowned the “Queen of Worry,” Gigi resigned her post many years ago and now lives happily in Florida with her husband, Peter and her cat Murphy.
I met Joe Wie last month when we planned his interview with me on the All Better podcast. I must say I was a bit smitten! Especially after hearing all the complimentary things he said about “Worry Less Now.”
He actually read it very carefully and said he had been rushing home to read it; and now his wife is reading it. Just what any author wants to hear!
Below I’m sharing our podcast audio, plus Joe’s story as told in his blog at Avenues Recovery Center “In Our Own Words.” I think you’ll find both fascinating!
NOT YOUR TYPICAL INTERVIEW: Joe Wie and Gigi Langer on the All Better Podcast, March 2022
STOPPING TO RUN AND FACING OUR DEMONS by Joe Van Wie
Halloween morning, 2019. I woke up alone, soaked in sweat, and suicidal, in the attic of my 9-bedroom Georgian mansion. It was the tail end of a years-long bender and had taken to a bunch of different stops. Passing out in different rooms of the house after spending a day or more drinking, using drugs, dosing psychedelics, and smoking cigarettes.
And then my body shut down. By this time, I was living mostly alone. Partiers who would come through to my place to crash or to sell drugs or to smoke and drink at all hours of the night. It worked for them. No one ever told them they needed to go to home.
I didn’t know it then, but my life had long been barreling toward that day. I was too numb, by both ego and substances, to think anything serious could happen to me. By mid-morning I was sitting across from a sober friend, my sponsor, and my attorney, faced with a clear ultimatum: die alone or get help.
Why it took me 41 years to fully surrender, I don’t truly know. My alcoholism had led me into the darkest, loneliest, and most hopeless rooms inside my mind, and I was trapped there, suffering without end, and completely unable to help myself.
Call it luck or chance or miracle or any other word that works for you, but that day, a small crack in my disdain for myself and my disinterest in life appeared. In a rare moment of pure vulnerability, I did it. I admitted to my friends, and more importantly to myself, the thing, the realization of the obvious truth I had spent so much energy running away from.
I needed help. My final run came to an anti-climactic end. But even as I accepted help that day, I didn’t fully trust that I’d stay sober. I’d been sober before, for two separate stints that lasted years. I was 16 years old the first time. Even when I was young, I lost all control when I took booze and drugs. I was sent away to a military reformatory school and spent nearly a year in long-term treatment.
After I was released, I stayed sober for 6 years before I got complacent and went out to try my hand at being a normal drinker. 22, and I was almost immediately controlled by an insatiable want to be drunk or high all the time. It wasn’t more than a few months until I couldn’t function as an adult. I was thrown out of NYU, fired from a 6-figure position at a company I respected, and, for a bit, I committed myself to the tragedy my life was becoming.
It took just two years for me to find AA again. This time I got a sponsor and went all in with a sober community. Looking back on it now, I realize how pivotal my 7-month stay at a recovery house was to my next 13 years of sobriety. That long-term treatment center helped me establish a routine and normal habits. I had a framework to live without booze.
I learned how to do regular things for the first time, like how to take care of myself, how to hang out with people and build relationships without doing drugs, and how to go to meetings and drink coffee around the clock.
Over the next 13 years, and largely thanks to support from my sober community in Scranton, lifelong friends, and my sponsor, I created a life. I built a multi-million-dollar business, won 12 international film awards for three feature films. I became a homeowner for the first time. I was politically active, and I contributed to organizations I believed in. Things seemed to be working and I was impressed with my life for over a decade.
Complacency bit me in the rear again. My life was without intention, my ambitions designed around ego. I felt disillusioned with AA and lost grip of what the alcoholic condition was and always will be for me; a desperate attempt to deal with fear. I ended my 13 years of sobriety and fell into full-blown addiction within a matter of months, despite my every effort to “only” drink, smoke, and use drugs occasionally.
The last years of that run were, without question, the darkest of my life. My business collapsed, my house was in foreclosure, and my life was in shambles. Worst of all, the drugs and booze, and even brief stints without them, couldn’t keep me from questioning the worth of my life. I couldn’t stop harming the people around me—especially my family and life-long friends—and I couldn’t find a door back to meaningful sobriety. Even a reprieve that lasted more than a week was beyond me.
Surrendering was a year-long process. It started when I woke up from a 19-day medically induced coma with double-pneumonia and a wrecked immune system. I was terrified and desperate to find a solution, but it would be almost a year before I was openminded enough to consider the most daunting possibility of all. The possibility that maybe, just maybe, I’d been wrong my entire life.
Sobriety wasn’t going to happen for me the same way it had in the past. My spiritual connection to myself had long disappeared, and I was looking for shortcuts to skip all the important steps. I didn’t stop drinking even after consciously acknowledging that I was hurting myself by consuming alcohol. If anything, my drinking and drug usage got worse. I didn’t know it then, but I was treating depression with psychedelics and cocaine.
I found myself stuck in the place all alcoholics find themselves, that torturous chamber of the mind in which two total paradoxes are allowed to co-exist. I wanted to stop using but I couldn’t. I wanted to take a break from booze, but no matter how strong my willpower, I ended up blacked out on my bathroom floor.
I was kept alive by booze and drugs, but I was also disgusted by those things. I was living in a repeating loop of sameness. When my sponsor and lawyer knocked on my door on Halloween day, I answered the door as a shell of myself. I was cynical, hopeless, and I knew my end was close.
So did they. It was in sitting across from them listening to them repeat my irrational, dangerous, and delusional actions back to me for the thousandth time that something in me broke. I wanted a new purpose, and I was desperate enough to admit that out loud.
My last drink was on Halloween 2019. Now, at 43 years old, I have a life that defies what I thought was possible. I’ve been sober 2 years, re-met the love of my life and got married. My baby girl was born on Halloween 2020, exactly one year since I surrendered.
Yes, Halloween has been kind of important day in my life. I have a new career that makes helping others the centerpiece of my days. I’m in the process of opening an extended-living sober house for men in the Scranton area, to help other alcoholics rebuild their lives one day at a time.
Adventure and irony and happiness and, as sappy and trite as it sounds, love has returned to my life. Or maybe it has appeared there for the very first time. I’m aware, awake, and intentional, and I’m as present as I’ve ever been.
As imperfect and as ridiculously as my journey to meaningful sobriety has been, I don’t regret it. I’m awed by how my suffering led me to what I have today—a daily mediation practice, a secular practice of the 12 Steps, a community in Refuge Recovery, and, most meaningful of all, a family, a purpose.
The whiskey, the cocaine, the marijuana, the LSD, DMT, extasy, the psilocybin, the Ketamine, the Xanax, the cigarettes—all of it. While it very nearly had me dispatched, it moved me closer little by little, to the life I have now.
Gigi Langer has been sober 35 years, and holds a PhD in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford University. Formerly crowned the “Queen of Worry,” Gigi resigned her post many years ago and now lives happily in Florida with her husband, Peter and her cat Murphy.
In recovery we’re asked to abandon our old guides and follow the will of our higher power.
At first it seems impossible: How in the world can I know God’s will for me?
Perhaps this is the wrong question.
We need only “figure out” one thing: how to recognize and reject our old guides: self-deception, dishonesty, selfishness, fear, and resentments. These motives led us to use others for our own gain, to dull our best selves, and withhold love not only from others but from ourselves.
Once we reject our old ways, we open ourselves to a power greater than ourselves. Think of this “higher power” as our deepest loving sense of what is right at any given moment. We need only suspend our fearful thinking and follow the lead of this loving wisdom. That’s it! Simple, but not easy, right?
How We Change
AA’s set of 12 steps, practiced over time with caring mentors, gives us a completely new direction. Following this path transforms our self-centered life into one of care, gratitude, and generosity.
At first, we find our new guidance from meetings: Don’t think, don’t drink, and go to meetings. God’s will, not my will. This too shall pass. Surrender to win. As our new sober friends share the miracles in their lives–not the least of which is quitting drinking and drugging–they give all the credit to a mysterious “power greater than myself.”
Throughout our recovery, we join voices in the Serenity prayer—an easy one to accept. But, at the end of meetings, we often say the Lord’s prayer—a much tougher sell for me. At first, the male image of a higher power just didn’t feel safe. But I stuck with it because the Third step said I could understand this power in my own way.
How Do We Follow A Higher Power?
Slowly, these new ideas seeped into my heart, replacing my selfish ways with loving guidance. When I found an image of an angelic girl in a flowing robe, walking with folded hands, my heart immediately opened to her as my loving guide. As I’ve studied other wisdom traditions, I’ve accepted other names for this power; for me, they are all the same loving presence.
Today, as I was listening to Carol Howe explain A Course in Miracles Lesson 155 (“I will step back and let love God/lead the way”), I saw myself following beautiful flowing presence of that first image. I held her hand as she led me along her unerring path to God’s love. Indeed, I prefer to live each moment this way: not looking too far ahead, just being in the present knowing that the next steps in my life are perfectly guided by loving power.
Now, I must admit I often allow fear’s voice to hide the truth of this conscious connection. Eventually, however, I notice I’ve lost my serenity, and I consciously grab the hand of my dear, sweet guides. The more I practice this connection, the less I go off track because my mind is filled with love, whether I’m aware of it or not.
Decide to Follow a Guide to a Better Life
So, how do we know God’s will for us? We honestly open ourselves to new ways of thinking. We get quiet and listen for wisdom. When we act from loving motives (care, kindness, comfort, self-compassion), I believe we make God smile and say, There they are, giving and receiving love just as I hoped they would.
I’D LOVE TO HEAR HOW YOU CONNECT WITH YOUR HIGHER POWER!
Gigi Langer has been sober 35 years, and holds a PhD in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford University. Formerly crowned the “Queen of Worry,” Gigi resigned her post many years ago and now lives happily in Florida with her husband, Peter and her cat Murphy.
